


The Fall

by nerddowell



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: (kind of), Alternate Universe - Canon, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Garlan being Garlan, Inspired by Once Upon a Time (TV), Loras is mistaken for a girl (easy mistake to make), Multi, Orchards, Rating May Change, Renly is adorably useless at everything, Romance, Sheriff Stannis, Slow Burn, farming, the Tyrells grow apples and roses because Highgarden (also Massachusetts)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-29
Updated: 2018-07-19
Packaged: 2018-09-03 03:17:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 10,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8694271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nerddowell/pseuds/nerddowell
Summary: There came a time in every young man’s life, Renly told himself as he shifted gears and peeled out of the turning for the interstate, when he had to sling his battered old suitcase full of designer clothes he couldn’t truthfully afford in the trunk of his car and get the hell out of Dodge.
Renly is a guy who's stagnating in the little town he's stuck in, so one day he throws in the towel and drives off for an adventure. Problem is, his car breaks down about six hours in. Luckily, the sons of a local farmer pass by in their commercial truck and offer him a tow, and the rest, as they say, is history.(I reread my favourite book recently and it's about a guy who runs an orchard in Massachusetts. I got to thinking, Hey, aren't the Fossoways associated with apples? and thus my farmer!AU Game of Thrones fanfic idea was born.)
  Hopefully will now be being updated at least once a month!





	1. Getting The Hell Out of Dodge

**Author's Note:**

> They say 'write what you know'. What I know at the moment would mean Renly was a depressed barista working at Starbucks for minimum wage, with his boyfriend miles away and working a similarly dead-end waiting job, and that's no fun. So I wrote what I don't know (first-hand, anyway) instead: Massachusetts, USA and an apple orchard!
> 
> In all seriousness, I have a) never written a Game of Thrones fanfic before and b) never been to Massachusetts. Or Maine. I have attempted to research as best I can (and left all other details vague, such as time setting - I'm thinking around the early 90s, because a) mobiles hadn't really become A Thing yet and b) I really want Loras to go through that awkward rebellious Nirvana fan stage), but this is unbeta'ed and therefore all mistakes are mine. Anyway, hopefully you will all enjoy it? Or at least not hate it.

_“It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.”_  
\- Henry David Thoreau

 

There came a time in every young man’s life, Renly told himself as he shifted gears and peeled out of the turning for the interstate, when he had to sling his battered old suitcase full of designer clothes he couldn’t truthfully afford in the trunk of his car and get the hell out of Dodge. Or in his case, Storm’s End, Maine.

The town where he’d grown up – if indeed you could call anywhere with less than a thousand inhabitants a town – was a tiny jumble of houses with a post office, a sheriff’s office (where his brother Stannis sat at his desk grinding his teeth all day without even a sweet-stealing middle schooler to yell at), and a general store that only ever seemed to have dog biscuits and toilet bleach in stock. The community was so small that the town had never bothered to build a school, and anyway, Renly had been sent out-of-state to boarding school after expensive hell-hole of a boarding school in New Hampshire. For the first three years he had sent letters home every weekend, begging to be allowed to come back and be home-schooled by Mr Cressen, Robert and Stannis’ old tutor. Stannis, in crabbed handwriting that matched his personality perfectly, told him bluntly that Robert could afford to send him somewhere better, and that he wouldn’t be allowed home until Christmas (and only then, Renly could tell, at Mr Cressen’s insistence).

After completing high school and graduating with lower grades than he was really capable of, and with Stannis breathing down his neck, he tried college. Politics and government, as both of his brothers had done before him. (Stannis had excelled. Robert had spent most of his time at universities drunk in a toga at various fraternity house parties). He finished college, came back, got a job in his eldest brother’s office and stagnated until he finally snapped, and, well, yeah. Threw all of his things in the trunk of his car, emptied his savings into his wallet and a sock at the bottom of his rucksack, and hit the road.

There wasn’t anything in Maine for him anymore.

* * *

  
_He hated the new house. He still called it the new house, even though Robert and Stannis had moved there almost fifteen years ago, not long after he started school, virtually as soon as they’d managed to sell their parents’ house, the old house. The home they’d grown up in – a small (or ‘cosy’ as the estate agent had called it) church conversion with five rooms total including the upstairs nursery (Renly’s room) that had used to be a choir loft. It had had whitewashed stone walls, and polished floors, and honeysuckle and ivy creeping in at the windows because their mother loved the smell in summer and the colour of the leaves in fall. There had been a fireplace, where Renly would sit and listen to Mr. Cressen tell stories from their grandfather’s rocking chair. A kitchen where he could scramble up onto the breakfast bar and pull down his own cartons of cereal when Robert and Stannis were busy at work and at lessons. And a garden, a tiny scrubby rocky little stretch of green at the back of the house surrounded by a low brick wall and a straggly hedge, where Renly would pretend he was caught in a maze and had to rescue a princess from a tower, or where he would be a dragon terrorising the smallfolk of a medieval village._

 _The new house was enormous, modern, and ugly. Built by Tywin Lannister, a real estate agent and loan shark from California whose glossy blonde daughter Robert had married and whose entire family was loathed by all three brothers alike. It was Tywin who had bought their old home and converted it into a pawn shop, from which Stannis suspected he was running all sorts of illegal business transactions which Robert – town mayor and strictly supposed to be in charge of maintaining Storm End’s clean if dull reputation – completely ignored. The marriage between he and Cersei Lannister produced three children, two tolerable and one completely unhinged. Renly pointedly watched the film_ We Need To Talk About Kevin _in the main living room and even went so far as to leave the book on Robert’s bedside table, but his brother spilt scotch all over it and ended up throwing the book in the wastebasket._

_Stannis lived in the east wing, as far away from the rest of the family as possible, with his wife Selyse, moustachioed and as bitter as her husband, and their daughter Shireen. Renly liked his niece, although it was unfortunate that she had both inherited Selyse’s mug-handle ears and a skin condition that left her with hard, scaly patches over her body. Despite her stern upbringing and the boredom she must have felt being practically locked in her room all day, Shireen had a sweet temper and a sparkling laugh that always made Renly smile, and she was shamelessly his favourite. It hurt to leave her behind the most; Shireen always reminded him of what he supposes his mother must have been like, if he could only remember her properly.  
_

* * *

  
The road he was following should take him to the interstate connecting his small corner of Maine to Boston, New York, Baltimore, all the huge cities he’d heard about on the ancient Bakelite TV in Robert’s old room or read about in his books. They represented a bigger world outside of Storm’s End, where people didn’t immediately know everyone else’s business. Where there would be a 7-11 on every corner where he could at least buy a bottle of Mountain Dew to take the sweat of the summer off his back, instead of hoping that some little housewife hadn’t bought the last bottle of milk from the ancient icebox in the corner of the store. He looked forward to seeing them immensely.

The radio in his car was crackling in the dead space between stations and dark clouds were threatening to roll in off the horizon as he came to a junction and, pausing to check the map, realised that he’d taken a wrong turn approximately fifty miles back and was now in the back ass of nowhere, New Hampshire. He hadn’t even noticed crossing the state line. Thick woodland crowded both sides of the road, familiar balsam firs and black spruces from the woods around his home that held cawing birds and screaming chicks.

He sighed, ruing the many days he had skipped geography in favour of smoking behind the bike sheds or chasing after one boy or another, and decided to take the right turn anyway. From then on, he would play a game: left, then right, then left again, for as long as it took to get anywhere. No doubt he’d end up going in circles, wasting gas and what few pitiful life savings he had (the family account had been squandered by Robert many years ago, and was now being bailed out increasingly by Cersei’s father like a spider drawing flies closer and closer on a web), but it might be interesting at least. He’d read _On The Road_ like every other pretentious seventeen-year-old.

New Hampshire’s wooded, hilly countryside turned into equally wooded, slightly flatter Massachusetts as he continued to drive. His belly was gurgling and the gas needle was beginning to float into the red, so he turned towards the sign for Springfield at the next intersection and bought a coke and a flapjack at the first gas station he saw. The car managed all of another ten minutes after that until it sputtered and stopped with an ominous creaking sound in the middle of a deserted road as night was beginning to fall and the gathering storm clouds finally broke like Niagara Falls over Renly’s head.

He scrambled back into the car and sat wetly on the front seat for several minutes before steeling himself for the long walk back to the last gas station he’d seen, two or three miles back up the road.

At the point where he was about to give up, being hopelessly lost again (he’d been distracted by a sign for an orchard nearby, and had started wandering down that road in case it was closer and they had a phone he could use to call a repair truck), he heard the rumbling of a vehicle behind him and stepped off the road to see a pickup truck with a pattern of apples and golden roses stencilled around the cab pull up beside him. A head with long, curling hair and a laughing sort of voice called out, “Need a hand?” before a hand opened the cab door and the body connected swung out of the cab, landing neatly on booted feet.

The young man introduced himself as Garth, or Gar, or something similar. He was stocky, with a friendly, handsome face and curly hair that reached his collar dry and was quickly lengthening out in the rain to almost mid-chest length. He listened with his head cocked as Renly explained about his car before calling to a girl in the cab – Laura – to let Renly sit up there with them as they headed back to give him a tow. Renly babbled his thanks profusely as he clambered up into the cab and set himself in the nearest available seat before looking up into quite possibly the most beautiful face he’d ever seen – on a woman or a man.

“H-hey,” he mumbled, slightly dazed. “Laura, right? I’m Renly.”

The girl narrowed her eyes.

“Lor _as_. With an _S_. I’m not a girl.”

Gar, beside him, let out a snort and clapped Renly on the back as he started up the engine. “You’re not the first person to make that mistake and probably won’t be the last. When he was little, me and Will used to tell everyone we had twin sisters, and Loras looked so much like Margie that no one ever doubted us.” He leaned past Renly and pinched his brother’s cheek patronisingly with a wicked grin. “You’re just such a darn cutie, aren’t you?”

Loras punched Renly on the arm, hard. “Give that on to him,” he snarled, “he won’t let me reach.”

Renly rubbed his bicep ruefully, wondering what on earth he’d gotten himself into with these two, and gazed out of the windshield, keeping a careful watch for his car.


	2. Welcome to Tyrell's

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oooohhhhhh my God, this took me forever to get around to writing. I'm so sorry! Bad Charlie [slaps hand].
> 
> Unbeta'ed because I am terrible, all mistakes mine, sorry sorry!

The truck rumbled and clattered down a narrow dirt track as Renly steadfastly stared through the windshield and avoided catching Loras-with-an-S’s eye; Loras was alternating between glowering at Renly and outright glaring at Gar, huffing under his breath every few moments to make sure his displeasure was known. Renly shrunk back into his seat a little, feeling his cheeks flame, and occupied himself with scrutinising the mechanisms of his seat belt entirely too fastidiously in his attempts not to cause Loras any more insult. Gar whistled cheerfully as he swung the truck back onto the main road, and Renly finally saw his car in the distance with no small amount of relief. Gar’s quiet amusement at Renly’s faux pas and Loras’ simmering temper left him feeling more than a little uncomfortable.

“Thanks,” he said, making to get out. Loras crossed his arms and refused to budge an inch, so Gar rolled his eyes and threw the cab door open, slinging himself out of his seat with the agility of a large, flannel-wearing cat, and helped Renly down. The pair of them walked the short way up to Renly’s flatlined Focus, hands up in front of their eyes to shield their faces from the rain. Renly gave the rear wheel a kick grumpily.

“When Robert got me a car for my twentieth, I was excited. Turns out he won it in a game of darts, of all things, which about sums up the kind of quality it is.”

Gar, whose truck was old for all that it seemed to be in good repair, and which rattled and grumbled incessantly over every tiny pit and piece of gravel in the road, gave him a toothy grin and shrugged. “I’ve seen worse.” He opened the hood and bent his head over, shaking his soaking hair out of his eyes and peering at the engine. “It’ll need a little work, but I think me and Loras can probably get it running again.”

“Loras doesn’t seem too inclined to help at the moment,” Renly said wryly, gesturing back at the truck, where Gar’s brother was just visible through the rain-spattered windshield, arms still crossed and sullen sulk on his full lips. He narrowed his eyes it seemed purely for Renly’s dubious benefit, and Gar clucked quietly before turning around and heading back to the truck. He rifled in the back for a few seconds, clattering among empty crates and crinkling a tarp, before pulling out a set of jumper cables and a tow line.

“We’ll try giving it a jump start,” he said, bending over the open hood again to attach the cables, “and if all else fails, at least we can tow you back to the farm so’s you’ve somewhere to stay the night. You’ll be able to try Mom’s famous apple pie, and her less famous lasagne.” He grinned again and attached the free ends of the cables to the terminals on the truck’s battery, gesturing for Loras to take over the controls as he sat in the Ford’s driver’s seat and experimentally tried the engine.

The Ford didn’t even sputter.

Loras revved the truck loudly, peering through the windshield, and Gar tried again. There was a weak cough from the engine, but nothing further. He shook his head and clambered back out of the Ford.

“We’ll give you a tow back. Climb in with Loras.”

The farm Gar drove them back to was almost exactly what Renly had expected from a family-owned business. They rumbled past a couple of fields with neat, uniformly-planted trees, the outermost ones with their branches slightly overhanging the dirt and gravel track up to the farmhouse about a mile off the road. It was a whitewashed stone building with a brilliant green door and shutters painted yellow that had begun to peel slightly. A couple of chickens were still fluttering around the yard, and a cat perched on the doorstep as Gar pulled into the car port and hopped out, boots loud on the gravel. On Renly’s other side, Loras dropped out of the cab soundlessly.

Gar unlocked a side door with a homely lace curtain screening the glass panes, and ushered Renly inside into a warm, brightly lit kitchen smelling of apples and cinnamon and pulling out a chair at the table.

“Welcome to Tyrells’.”  
  


* * *

  
Around the table were gathered five or six other people, whom Renly assumed to be the rest of the family. There was a pretty, curvy girl in a flour-smudged apron, her dark hair tied back in a messy and equally floury bun, who immediately bustled around the edge of the table to take Gar’s jacket and hand him a plate of lasagne still steaming from the microwave; another girl, a willowy, doelike sort of girl with deceptively guileless eyes whom Renly could imagine matching even Tywin Lannister for creative deviousness; a stouter, handsome woman with greying blonde hair who fussed over Loras, to his evident displeasure, and her husband beside her, portly and balding with a neat reddish beard and bright brown eyes; and an elderly woman in an old-fashioned head wrap who immediately zeroed in on Renly and announced to them all at large, “Ah, we seemed to have adopted another stray out in the cold tonight. Is no one going to sit the boy down and offer him something to eat?”

Loras fought his way out from his mother’s arms and reluctantly dragged over a spare chair before turning and plating up a heaped serving of lasagne, which he promptly carried over to the window seat and started devouring as though he’d not eaten in months. His grandmother tutted, narrowing her eyes at him, and was resolutely ignored.

“Forgive my youngest grandson’s rudeness, he’s not yet learned to be civil despite his fifteen years on the planet.” She gestured imperiously towards Renly, and he found himself seated and given a huge serving of lasagne by their mother, who fretted over how cold he must be and offered a hot mug of cider, an extra jacket and more food all in one breath. He smiled and shook his head.

“Thank you, I’m fine. I can’t thank you all enough for your hospitality and Gar’s help towing my car. I’ll try and get it fixed tonight and be out of your hair by morning.”

“Nonsense,” the grandmother said crisply, “you must stay the night at least. I believe Loras has a bunk free in his room, and it might force him to learn a few manners in the meantime.”

There was a noise of lasagne-muffled outrage from the window seat before everyone’s attention was diverted by another man, looking to be in his early thirties, stepping through the kitchen door on a crutch and offering Gar a large bottle of cider.

“The last of last year’s batch,” he said, smiling, “as I heard we have guests.” He nodded to Renly, who nodded back out of habit and then, feeling stupid, introduced himself.

“Now who’s being rude, Grandma?” Loras said thickly, swallowing a mouthful, “you haven’t even introduced us all.”

“You’re right,” his mother said, running a hand through her hair. “Welcome to Tyrell’s, my love. I’m Alerie, and this is my husband, Mace–” The man beside her raised a hand – “and his mother Olenna, my sons Willas, Garlan and Loras–” She pointed to each of them in turn. “My daughter Margaery,” and the girl who had struck Renly as so clever smiled, a sweet, small sort of smile that promised good things and mischief, “and Garlan’s girlfriend Leonette, one of our neighbours’ daughters.”

Everyone said their various hellos as Renly nodded awkwardly at each of them before turning his attention gratefully to his plate. The lasagne was delicious, and it was scant moments before his dish was empty and he was all but licking the plate clean. He would have been tempted, were it not bad manners and had he not had the fear of God – or rather, Olenna – put into him on that front by the Tyrells’ intimidating grandmother.

Loras brought his own plate over and dumped it carelessly in the sink, licking a trace of tomato sauce from the corner of his lips before heading out of the kitchen and upstairs, boot tread heavy on the creaking beams. Garlan took Renly’s plate from him and turned to the washing up as Margaery helped their grandmother from her chair and out into the corridor, presumably also to bed. Alerie and Mace disappeared after another few moments, and Willas sat down carefully in one of their vacated chairs, pouring both himself and Renly a mug of cider.

“Garlan said he towed you in?”

“Yes.” Renly took a sip, pleasantly surprised to find it dry, crisp and refreshing, despite being lukewarm. “My car’s not the most reliable, and it broke down just up by the junction. Garlan and Loras were kind enough to stop and at least try to jump start it.”

“We’ve put it outside,” Garlan told him, elbow-deep in suds, “under the car port. We’ll move it to the barn so Loras and I can work on it tomorrow, and then you’ll be back on the road in no time.”

“Thanks.”

Willas smiled, taking a deep draught of his own cider. “There’s nothing to thank us for. Anyone would do the same around here.”

Renly shrugged wryly. “I guess I’m too used to where I’m from, where people wouldn’t help and would probably gut it for parts whilst you called for a tow truck. Loras seemed tempted after I misheard his name–”

Garlan guffawed and turned around again. “Will, he called him Laura. His face! Loras looked like he was sucking a lemon. And haven’t we told him – if he only didn’t look so much like Margie, if he cut his hair, maybe–” He wiped his eyes and snorted. “It’s honestly not the first time, Renly, and won’t be the last. Loras has always been pretty.”

Willas quieted him with a wave of his hand. “Loras can hold a grudge like an angry bear, but I’m sure he’ll get over it. Give it a few days and he’ll mellow out, or at least take it out on inanimate objects in your absence.”

Renly didn’t feel all that reassured.


	3. Common Sense (Isn't All That Common)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> uGGHHH I am SO sorry this update took like a million years, I lost what I had and ugh I had to like totally replan it from what I could remember and. yeah. so it took a while. BUT I am back with it now and will hopefully be updating far more regularly in future, because if I don't you have my permission to come here and kick my ass until I do.

Garlan ended up showing Renly to Loras’ room, since his host had so rudely departed earlier. Renly took the opportunity to have a look around, following Garlan up the stairs and admiring the multitude of photographs lining the walls. Loras was instantly recognisable among all of them – usually scowling at the camera, covered in mud with arms crossed and his hair ruffled as though he resented being dragged from whatever he’d been doing to have his photo taken. He was an adorable child, Renly thought to himself, with chubby, dimpled cheeks and a smattering of freckles over his nose, and all those curls. He didn’t quite see the supposedly eerie similarity to Margaery when they both were little, although if Loras had ever smiled in childhood photos then maybe it would have been there.

Garlan knocked on Loras’ door before letting Renly in. Loras was standing in front of the bed in only a pair of boxers, eyes narrowed and fixed on the ceiling, brandishing a large book. He ignored Renly’s entrance entirely, flicking his wrist suddenly to slap the book against the ceiling before pulling it away to leave a smudge of dead insect against the plaster and a smug grin on his face. A grin which quickly dropped the moment he spotted Renly hesitantly standing in the doorway.

‘That’s your bed,’ he said firmly, pointing at a narrow single laid at the absolute opposite end of the room which Renly hadn’t even spotted until then. There was a towel and a toothbrush set on top of the duvet, which Renly greatly appreciated upon realising he’d brought little more than his wallet and clothes with him. He slid his suitcase under the bed and sat down, trying not to watch Loras and failing miserably.

He was slim but sturdy, Renly noticed, like a ballet dancer. He had a lot more muscle than Renly had expected and a lithe grace he’d already noticed, and which showed as he moved about the room, even as slouched and sullen as he was. He pushed his hair back out of his eyes a lot, and squinted a little when looking at the titles of the books on his shelves, as though he needed glasses. He caught Renly staring and scowled, narrowing his eyes again. Renly looked away quickly.

Eventually Loras stopped prowling around the bedroom and threw on a pair of tattered sweatpants and a tshirt with Bruce Springsteen’s _Born To Run Tour 1977_ printed on the front, half of the lettering faded and Springsteen’s face missing entirely. He grabbed a hairband off his night stand and left the room, his bare feet soft on the floorboards before he came back and his head popped around the door jamb with a frustrated expression on his face.

‘You coming or what?’

‘Where are we going?’ Renly asked, at a total loss.

‘To fix your car, idiot. So you can get out of my room and get back to wherever you’re supposed to be going.’ Loras disappeared again, stomping down the stairs with considerably less of an effect _sans_ boots, although he toed into a pair of working boots as he reached the bottom of the stairs. Renly hopped after him, stopping to put on his own shoes, and followed Loras out through the main door and into the rain to reach the barn where the family was storing his clapped-out Toyota. Rain trickled down the back of his neck as he hunched, trying to avoid as much of the rain as possible until the barn door opened and a light went on inside.

He hurried in, shaking his head like a dog trying to dry out, and heard an unmistakeable snicker from Loras’ direction. It was quickly stifled behind a knuckle when he looked up, however, Loras’ intense frown coming back over his face. He knelt down in front of the car, popping open the hood to have a look at the engine before whistling through his teeth. Renly’s heart sank.

‘Bad news?’

‘No,’ Loras said stubbornly. ‘I can get it fixed. The sooner I do, the sooner–’

‘The sooner I leave and you get your moody teenage inner sanctum back, yeah,’ Renly said, with only a small bite to his words. Loras glowered for a moment before focusing on the car.

He tinkered away as Renly wandered around the barn, observing all of the tools hanging up on the walls and the pieces of machinery under tarps beneath the hayloft. There was a telescope set up on a tripod in front of the window, and he climbed the stairs to have a look before Loras’ voice, sharp but muffled from inside the car hood, said ‘Don’t go up there.’

‘Sorry,’ Renly said, loud so Loras could hear. The boy grunted and banged something inside Renly’s car with a wrench, swearing when it had no effect. Loras’ accent was softer and rounder than Renly was used to, and it struck him as pleasant, even when it was wrapped around harsh words. He came back down the stairs to sit on a log beside Loras’ legs, and ran a hand through his hair, worrying about his car and what he was going to do now. Realistically, his best option was to go back home. He’d left a perfectly comfortable job, a steady income and a roof he owned (at least partly) over his head for the four metal walls of his car and the thousands of miles of road webbing across America. He’d told his brothers (well, Stannis, really) that they could shove their jobs and expectations for him up their asses, and it wasn’t as though he could come back now without losing face, but the reality was he’d left with no plan and by burning just about every bridge he had.

‘I think you’re an idiot,’ Loras said from inside the hood of the car, and Renly startled.

‘Was I–’

‘Talking out loud? Yep.’ Loras banged something again with the wrench and cursed. ‘I think you’re an idiot. First of all, who just ups and leaves like that? You ever heard of Christopher McCandless? That’s what he did, and look how well that worked out for him. Second of all, you’ve already gotten lost, so that suggests that you’re not the brightest spark in the bulb at the best of times, and you’ve decided to just go travelling across America on your own, with nothing but that tiny suitcase of crap and the world’s shittiest Toyota, which has already broken down. And thirdly–’

‘Thirdly, I’m not in the mood to be lectured by a midget in a Bruce Springsteen tshirt,’ Renly said defensively, and Loras’ head reappeared from beneath the car hood to fix him with a stern expression uncannily like his grandmother’s.

‘I’m fifteen and I’ve got more common sense than you.’

‘Clearly it’s not all that common then, is it?’ Renly retorted. ‘And just because you can – I don’t know, fix a car and plow a field and I can’t doesn’t mean you’re more sensible than me.’

‘I’m sensible enough not to go driving without knowing where the nearest mechanic is.’

‘You have no sense of adventure, clearly,’ Renly laughed, sweeping his arms wide as though encompassing the whole world. ‘I don’t want to live planning out where I need to be in the morning. I’ve had enough of paper-pushing and rubber-stamping and being responsible and sensible. Where’s the fun in that? I want to see the sea. I want to see the _whole world_ outside of Storm’s End, Maine. I want to fly a plane one day, or sail across one of the Great Lakes. I want to do a treetop walk and build a cabin in the woods and count the stars and live.’

‘Well, Thoreau, the twenty-first century just dropped by your bank with that reality check.’

‘It bounced,’ Renly replied, and was rewarded with the barest trace of a smile on Loras’ lips.  


* * *

  
At two a.m., when Renly heard soft snores coming from underneath the car where Loras was meant to be working, he smiled and gently roused the boy to come to bed. Loras was not impressed that Renly had caught him ‘resting my eyes’ from scrutinising the underneath of the Toyota’s chassis, but Renly stayed firm and insisted upon them both retiring for the night. Loras nodded reluctantly, wriggling out from under the car and turning off the barn light, shutting Renly’s car away as he led him back to the house. The night was clear after the rain, but muggy, the heat sticking damply to their skin, and Renly rolled his shoulders uncomfortably. It was going to be difficult to sleep in conditions like this, especially being hyperaware as he was that he was sharing the room with someone else.

Dragging him from his wonderings, Loras clattered up the stairs noisily, still in his boots, and dropped like a stone onto the bed. Renly inwardly sighed in sympathy; the boy looked absolutely shattered. Loras was so tired he was acting like he was drunk, struggling with the laces of his boots. Renly knelt down to help and was initially shoved away with an ‘I can do it!’ but after a couple of minutes of fumbling, Loras allowed him to unlace the boots and place them at the foot of the bed. Renly went under the covers to undress, dropping each piece of clothing on the floor as he shucked it off, and emerged a moment later to see Loras sat up in bed and smothering laughter into his hand.

‘You don’t have to hide,’ he shrugged with a smirk, ‘it’s not like I haven’t seen a dick before.’

‘I’m a stranger,’ Renly responded, cocking his eyebrow. ‘I’m not sure your mom and dad would like a stranger stripping off in front of their teenage son.’

‘They’re happy for one to share my room,’ Loras argued back, raising his eyebrows. ‘I’d say stripping in front of me is fair game.’

‘No game playing. Just… stripping off privately, in the dark, where you can’t see and where I can’t be accused of corrupting an innocent youth,’ Renly told him, and Loras snorted, flopping back against the pillows. His breathing evened back out into snores a few minutes later, and Renly slipped back beneath the covers to stare out of the window and stargaze until he fell asleep.


	4. The Rose Garden

He discovered the next morning that Loras seemed to have taken it upon himself to become Renly’s personal human alarm clock, and to wake him in the most disagreeable manner possible. He was therefore awoken the next morning by a pillow being smacked against his face and Loras’ husky teenage voice yelling ‘BREAKFAST!’ at an ear-splitting level of decibels right into his ear with no small amount of malicious glee. When Renly shoved the pillow off his face to blink blearily at Loras, the boy was leaning over him with a truly impressive bedhead, arms folded.

‘It’s time for breakfast,’ Loras announced, ‘and you’d better get downstairs quick or I’ll eat all the bacon.’

‘Not the bacon!’ Renly protested groggily, with a sleepy smile. Loras rolled his eyes and stomped out of the room, leaving his lodger to struggle into a pair of loose sweatpants and a tshirt before padding downstairs, stifling an enormous yawn into the back of his hand. From the pale, watery light trickling over the gentle hills around the farm, it had to be the crack of dawn, and yet all the Tyrells around him were bright eyed and fully awake despite the inhospitable hour. Renly felt like a bear unwillingly dragged out of hibernation.

‘Morning,’ he managed, giving everybody a sleepy wave, and sat down heavily in the chair Garlan pulled out for him. Alerie fixed him with an indulgent smile and passed him a plate heaped high with pancakes, bacon, and an egg; across the table from him Margaery was nibbling her way daintily through a piece of toast and Loras beside her was shovelling as much of his breakfast into his mouth as quickly as possible, as though afraid that if he ate at a normal pace Renly might try to strike up conversation with him. His grandmother flicked a towel over the back of his head and told him that he was ‘making a pig of yourself in front of our guest!’ Loras just scowled at her.

‘I went out to have a look at the car,’ Garlan said to Renly, leaning against the kitchen sideboard with a bowl of porridge in his hands, ‘I noticed someone’s been working on it, but I think it’s going to take a while to get her up and running again. It’s starting to look like we might have to call someone out.’

‘I can manage,’ Loras said thickly from across the table, glowering at Garlan and earning himself another admonishment from Olenna which he totally ignored. ‘We don’t have to call the Tarlys in. He’s useless, anyway.’

‘Randyll is a good man, Loras,’ their father said in a pompous tone of voice, ‘and he’s been servicing the family trucks and pickers for years. Don’t let personal enmity for the man–’

‘It’s not Randyll I’m talking about,’ Loras snapped back. ‘It’s that fat pig of a son he has, the one he insists on bringing along to ‘learn the family trade’ and who only gets in the way and can’t tell the difference between a wrench and a spanner.’

‘There’s a difference?’ Renly asked, surprised.

Loras fixed him with a pitying expression, and didn’t bother answering, instead just shaking his head and bolting down the last few forkfuls of his breakfast.  


* * *

  
As promised the night before, Garlan and Loras headed out to the barn after breakfast to continue working on the car. Renly decided to explore the farm instead, since his questions at breakfast had clearly marked him as about as useful as Tarly Jr. in attempting to fix anything mechanical, and thus Loras had banned him from trying to help. He didn’t mind. The morning was bright and clear, with only cotton-candy wisps of clouds breaking the stretch of blue sky, which struck him as excellent exploring weather. He picked up a jacket and toed into his trainers upstairs, resisting the urge to nosy around Loras’ bedroom, and left the farmhouse a moment later to have a proper look around.

The Tyrells’ farm was enormous, swathes of green stretching for miles around like a multihued carpet, with the scent of ripening fruit and blossom in the air. The first fields he came to were the orchards providing the ‘walls’ to the avenue of the driveway; peaches on one side, apples on the other. He clambered over the fence awkwardly, trying not to tear his trousers on any wayward nails or splinters of wood, and wandered around aimlessly, looking at the trees and reading the labels affixed to their trunks. _Baldwin. Dudley Winter. Garden Royal. Macoun. Roxbury Russet_.

Margaery appeared from behind one of the trees, her long hair loose almost to her waist, in a denim jacket embroidered with roses and a floaty white dress that skimmed her knees. She leaned against the trunk, smiling, and held out an apple, green with a blush stripe of red like the spray of freckles across her brother’s cheeks. (Not that Renly had been paying such close attention.)

‘Try it. Stark Earliest,’ she said, and opened his hand to deposit the fruit in his palm, pulling another off one of the branches and taking a bite. ‘A gift from one of Father’s friends up north. Their family cultivated it first, hence the name.’ She shrugged. ‘I think it’s a little dull, personally, but they’re good for salads and things.’

Renly had a sudden, disturbing memory of Sunday school (at which attendance was forced, first by his schoolmasters and then by Stannis in the holidays); a beautiful girl holding out an apple and bidding him eat it. Of course, Renly was hardly the Adam to Margaery’s Eve, if he was going to follow the analogy through, but all the same he found himself peering amongst the branches for a snake wrapping gleaming green coils amongst the fruits. Margaery looked up, following his gaze, and laughed, her voice as bright as the apples’ shiny red skins.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing,’ he said hurriedly, ‘just a strange thought.’ He took a large bite of the apple to distract her. It tasted much the same as any other apple to him, although he supposed he hadn’t been brought up amongst several hundred different varieties as she had. He was just beginning to think if it was the same for her as the way Renly himself could always taste different top notes and flavours in different coffees (he had, to his shame, allowed himself the one indulgence of frequenting the artisan coffee shop in Storm’s End, where the barista was a plain woman with an embarrassing crush on him), when Margaery wandered away, stepping neatly over the stile by the gate and walking back up towards the farmhouse.

Renly explored the orchard a little more, observing how the Stark trees were already beginning to groan under the weight of a bright crop of their greenish-reddish fruits, whilst their neighbours – Macouns, Baldwins, Russets – still looked to have barely more than a few green bulbs hidden amongst their leafy branches. He didn’t pick any more as he wandered through the fields towards the rear of the house, but stopped every so often to pluck the last of the blossom, or run his fingers over a cluster of leaves, amazed by how alive everything out here felt after the grey stagnation of Storm’s End.

At the back of the house were four large greenhouses in the Victorian style, with elaborate scrolling metalwork over the doors and domed glass roofs, where he could see Olenna and Willas knelt side by side in the greenhouse on the far left. Roses of every conceivable colour grew in neatly-pruned bushes, or wound around climbing trellises, as far as the eye could see; a swing set at the immediate rear of the house had a loveseat suspended by strong ropes from a wooden scaffold, and the seat itself had roses carved into the wood along the back and arms. Renly walked past several flowerbeds, the first full of snow-white and blue roses with a small sign in a woman’s neat handwriting reading SANSA (the white) and LYANNA (the blue); the second held three bushes bursting with gold-tinged red roses Renly had seen in his life, which were given the labels ARIANNE, ELLARIA, and ELIA; the third, a plot full of crimson roses so dark they seemed purple in places, which were named NYMERIA. The last, however, was the most beautiful, with flowers the colour of gold – not yellow, but gold, glittering like precious gems in the sunlight with beads of dew on the tips of the petals like tiny diamonds. These were labelled ALERIE, for the largest bush, and MARGAERY, for the one beside it.

He was admiring these flowers with a stunned expression when Willas approached on his crutches, a soft smile on his face. He stopped beside Renly and leant down carefully, supporting himself on his crutch on his injured side, and brushed a thumb over one of the golden roses’ petals, wiping away the damp.

‘They’re beautiful,’ Renly said stupidly, for want of anything else to say.

‘Yes. Father bred them both especially, these,’ he gestured to the larger, ‘for Mother, and these for Margaery.’ He plucked one carefully, handing it to Renly to look at. ‘It was very difficult to get that true golden colour to them, you know. The first were too dark, orangeish in places, and had only streaks of this colour. But we managed to breed those with another similar colour, and then again, until we got a steady result.’ He gestured to the patch of Arianne roses.

‘Loras hates those, he says they’re ugly.’ Willas chuckled, as though it were an in joke. ‘He hates anything Dornish.’

‘They’re Dornish roses?’

‘Of a sort. A gift from the Martells, after an incident when I was younger. I attended their riding school one summer, but the horse threw me and my leg was crushed. They obviously did everything they could, hence why I can still walk, but Loras never forgave them. Mother had to transplant them into the greenhouses for a couple of seasons because Loras kept threatening to sabotage them.’

Renly laughed. ‘From what I’ve heard and seen of Loras already, that sounds like exactly the sort of thing he’d do.’

Willas nodded with a grin.


	5. Kitchen Duty

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FINALLY updating this fucker. FINALLY.

They had lunch in the orchard, Alerie carrying a tray of sandwiches and a jug of lemonade out from the kitchen and setting it down on the grass. Garlan dropped out of one of the trees above the picnic like a wildcat, landing on his feet and immediately sitting down on a stump to help himself to a BLT on Alerie’s granary bread and a glass of lemonade. Willas ambled over a short while later, leaning heavily on his crutch, and took Garlan’s seat when it was offered. Renly passed him the plate of sandwiches.

‘I love this place,’ he said, well aware of the sheer awe in his tone as he looked around the enormous orchard, the hundreds of trees all in various stages of growth and harvest around them. Willas smiled. Garlan grinned, close-lipped around a bulging mouthful of cheese ploughman’s.

‘It’s pretty sweet.’

‘It’s amazing,’ Renly said honestly. ‘It’s so big. And the flowers everywhere – it’s beautiful.’

‘Willas and Mom’s pride and joy,’ Garlan said, knocking Willas’ shoulder with his own gently, and Willas nodded. They chatted about the history of the place for a while, punctuating the snippets of conversation with hearty bites of sandwich, and Renly listened intently. Highgarden, as the farm was called, had been in the Tyrell family for generations. They’d been growing apples since it was begun, although theirs was less known for their apples and more for their roses. The Fossoways, Leonette’s family, were the biggest producers of apples and cider in Massachusetts.

‘It seemed fitting that one of us should finally marry one,’ Garlan said with another wide grin. He was as smiley and personable as his younger brother was proud and prickly, Renly thought. He liked Garlan immensely, but all the same, he wasn’t drawn to him as he was to Loras. (Which was a shame, because he was pretty sure that Garlan at least tolerated him, whereas Loras still looked at him as though he’d shit in his favourite pair of boots.)

Speak of the devil and he shall appear.

Loras vaulted over the fence separating the orchard from the driveway, carrying a rucksack that looked to be full of various tools and bits and pieces. Renly thought it must weigh a tonne, but he wouldn’t have known it from the way that Loras slung it over his back and tossed it down as though it weighed no more than one of the family’s apples.

‘Nice of you to join us,’ Garlan said to him, offering him the last sandwich. Loras protested – ‘Mom made loads, and you’ve eaten all the good ones!’ – before settling down on the grass under one of the trees, as far away from Renly as it was humanly possible to get and remain within reaching distance of the picnic. He pulled a chunk of oil-covered metal out of his backpack and commenced tinkering with it, a spanner in his mouth as he unscrewed various parts with deft fingers, cursing when he dropped a tiny wingnut in the grass.

‘What’s that?’ Renly asked, shuffling closer to have a better look.

‘Fuel injector,’ Loras grunted around the spanner.

‘The fuel injector was working fine, Loras,’ Garlan told him, making his own way over to supervise his brother’s disassembly. ‘Renly doesn’t need you breaking that as well.’

‘I’m not breaking it,’ Loras snapped, taking the spanner out of his mouth to wave it at Garlan admonishingly, ‘I’m finding out how it’s supposed to work so that I can fix it.’

‘That’s what the manual is for.’

‘Reading is for losers,’ Loras said succinctly, and Garlan raised his eyebrows.

‘You’re only saying that because you can’t.’

‘You can’t read?’ Renly asked, shocked.

Loras fixed him with an expression of loathing. ‘Of course I can fucking read, Garlan’s a moron.’

Garlan cackled, slapping Renly a high-five – ‘Amazing. I love this guy.’ – and climbed to his feet to join Willas on the stump, engaging him in a discussion about the merits of crossbreeding Stark Earliests with Jersey Blacks to create a large, sweet dessert apple that would ripen in the early autumn. Renly didn’t understand much, so he instead focused back on Loras, who was now cleaning the fuel injector with a chamois cloth, tongue sticking out slightly between his lips in concentration.

‘Will you have it up and running again soon, do you think?’

‘If I’m not bothered with stupid questions the whole time, yeah,’ Loras muttered, and Renly flinched, absurdly hurt. He knew Loras didn’t like him – the boy made no secret of that fact – and yet he hadn’t been expecting such a blunt brush-off. He climbed to his feet, brushing dirt off the seat of his jeans, and left Loras behind in the orchard with the Ford’s fuel injector and Garlan and Willas.

* * *

Alerie was in the kitchen, peeling enough apples to feed an entire army, when Renly stepped over the threshold. She greeted him with a smile, pulling out a chair at the table for him, and brought her work over from the countertop to keep him company as she peeled and cored the fruit.

‘I hope Loras is making you feel welcome upstairs.’

‘He is,’ Renly lied, and offered her a weak smile. Alerie shook her head, gesturing at him with her peeler.

‘That boy has no manners at all. You’d think we’d raised him in a barn!’ She dumped the peeled apple in a bowl and picked up another. ‘Mace and I despair, you know. He’s so solitary – he likes his own space. Very private. Garlan, when he was his age, he’d come and tell us everything – what was happening at school, how the apples were doing in the back yard, who he’d kissed behind the bike sheds and who he’d seen fighting in the hallways. He even told us when he slept with Leonette, though we rather wished he hadn’t. He doesn’t really know where the ‘too much detail’ line is in the sand, doesn’t Garlan.’ She smiled, all fond amusement, and Renly grinned despite himself. ‘But Loras keeps himself to himself. We usually have to ask Margaery to find out what’s going on with him, and there’s some things he doesn’t even tell her.’

‘When I was younger, I used to wish and wish for someone to tell all my secrets to,’ Renly told her, picking up one of the apples and turning it over in his hands. Alerie handed him a knife, and he took up peeling it, grateful to have something to focus his attention on as he talked. ‘My parents died when I was a baby, so I only really had my brothers. And then, of course, I got sent away to school most of the time because they were still too young to be looking after a kid, really, even if we did have the money our parents left us. They did their best by me, of course, and I’m grateful, but I wish I’d had the sort of family I see here.’ He sighed, and Alerie leant across the table to rest one of her hands on top of his, her blue eyes bright with tears.

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘No, I’m sorry,’ Renly said, laughing awkwardly, ‘for dumping all that on you – I mean, I hardly know you.’

‘You’re staying with us,’ Alerie told him, ‘you’re practically family now anyway.’

Renly blinked, a lump in his throat, and then yelped as he caught his thumb on the edge of the knife, blood immediately welling to the surface. He stared at it in shock, the bead of red glistening there wetly, and felt a sick, woozy feeling descend almost immediately. He’d never liked the sight of blood, least of all his own, and his ears were going muffled as though he was submerged underwater as Alerie asked ‘Renly? Are you okay?’ before he nearly slipped sideways and she darted around the table to catch him by the shoulder, tucking his thumb firmly out of sight and helping him up to the sink.

She set the cold tap running and held his hand beneath the water, speaking soft words of reassurance until he managed to come back to himself, fierce embarrassment flooding through him at the fact that he’d almost fainted over a tiny cut on his thumb. Alerie dried the wound off with a piece of kitchen towel and covered it with a plaster, and then sat him at the kitchen table whilst she clucked over how pale he’d gone and made him a large mug of sweet tea.

‘There,’ she said, placing it in front of him, ‘drink up, now. You poor dear. D’you always go dizzy like that?’

‘Ever since I was little,’ Renly said, taking a grateful swig of the tea. ‘Scraped my knee once whilst out playing in the garden and Stannis had to carry me back inside.’ He’d never told that story before. He’d always been the weird orphaned kid at school in the first place, and he didn’t much like the thought of further ostracising himself by admitting that even the tiniest injury made him swoon like a Renaissance maiden.

There was a face at the door when he looked up, bright amber eyes and a cloud of dark curls, a black smudge of oil over the nose. Renly had no idea how long Loras had been standing there, listening, but it made his cheeks flush red with self-loathing embarrassment. Loras thought he was a stupid, careless idiot in the first place. No doubt now he thought worse – a stupid, careless idiot who was so pathetic he cried about his dead parents to anyone who’d listen and couldn’t even stomach the sight of a tiny cut. He knuckled at the corners of his eyes, pushing away any tears that might be hiding there, and bit his lip.

Alerie clucked again sympathetically, mussing his hair as though he was one of her own children, come to her when he was hurt, and the lump came back to Renly’s throat. He wasn’t lying when he said he’d wished for a family like this as a child. A mother to see to his hurts, a father to read him to sleep at night, brothers and sisters to play with instead of being pushed off knees with a ‘You’re too old for that,’ or being told to go away and play whilst the adults talked. (Play with who, Stannis? The fairies?)

‘Maybe next time we’ll have you in the office, or the greenhouse,’ Alerie said kindly. Renly nodded, his eyes on the flash of curls disappearing around the door jamb.


	6. Pulling Pigtails

An owl was hooting softly from the rafters of the barn. Renly could hear it from where he lay in his bed in Loras’ room, staring out of the window at the stars. He couldn’t sleep. There were too many thoughts rolling around his head like marbles, thinking about what Alerie had said at the dinner table earlier whilst they were peeling apples, about his parents, about Loras. Renly couldn’t imagine the younger boy having any sort of confidante, not even his sister; Loras was so intensely private that even his walls had walls. There was an entire stone keep around that boy’s mind, walls so high and thick he couldn’t imagine anything or anyone being able to break them down.

Loras was asleep in his bed on the other side of the room, breathing soft and even, and Renly rolled over to watch him. Curls fanned out like sun rays around his head on the pillow, his eyelashes laying webs of shadow over his cheekbones, full lips slightly parted. There was a freckle just touching the centre of the Cupid’s bow of his lip, a cluster of five or six dotted over the bridge of his nose; Renly counted them all, over and over, in his head until his eyelids grew heavy and sleep pulled him gratefully under.

The morning yielded another unpleasant wakeup call from his roommate, this time in the form of a cowbell being rattled obnoxiously loudly right next to his ear. He cracked one eye open to see Loras grinning evilly, still shaking the cowbell like mad as it clanged and clamoured loud enough to perforate his eardrum, before throwing it across the room and stomping downstairs. Renly groaned, sitting up and rubbing his eyes, yawning. It felt like he’d barely slept at all; by his own estimation it must have been at least two a.m. before he ever managed to sleep and he knew everyone on the farm habitually rose at six. The clattering of dishes and glassware downstairs, however, announced breakfast being prepared, and before long the smell of frying bacon lured him out of the bedroom and down to the kitchen.

He stumbled in, still only half-awake, to be immediately shoved down into a chair by Garlan and handed a heaped plate by Alerie, who seemed to be of the ‘everyone has to have thirds or else it’s not a proper meal’ persuasion when it came to food. Renly had never seen such generous portions in his entire life (not that he was complaining), and so he happily tucked in, helping himself to coffee. Beside him, Garlan was chattering to Mace about the grafting he was going to do this morning, Willas helping Margaery with her trigonometry homework, and Loras – as usual – wolfing down his breakfast as though his plate would be taken away from him any second. Olenna rolled her eyes.

‘You know, young man, it’s quite alright to breathe between bites.’

Loras shook his head, cheeks bulging as he stuffed another forkful of scrambled eggs into his mouth and swallowed with some difficulty before bolting up from the table. ‘Got work to do, Grandma.’

‘Surely nothing so important as to force you to eat like some sort of wild animal.’ She raised her eyebrows at him.

Loras shrugged, dumped his plate in the sink, and left the kitchen. Renly watched him vault the fence to the orchard like a seasoned professional gymnast, and took a sip of his coffee, quite happy to savour his own breakfast. Garlan grinned at him.

‘We should be thanking you,’ he told Renly, ‘before you came, we couldn’t get him to bloody well shut up at mealtimes.’

‘Garlan,’ Alerie chastised, and he ducked his head, the picture of contriteness, hiding his amused smile.

‘Sorry, Mom.’

* * *

As promised, Renly’s task for the day was to help Mace in the office with the business accounts. To Mace’s chagrin, however, it soon became apparent that Renly didn’t have the best head for numbers; he was constantly getting confused with trying to work out the percentages and averages Mace needed for their accounts books, and before long he was relegated to filing and sorting old papers. Mace spent the morning talking at, rather than to, Renly about his family and the history of the orchard; Renly was barely able to get a word in edgeways as he was lectured about the complete history of the current farmhouse, from four-room brick hovel to the expansive cottage it was today, the models of tractors used for ploughing the corn fields at the rear, and the life cycle of apple trees. Before long, Renly’s head was swimming trying to take in all this information, and he tuned out the background hum of Mace’s voice as he settled into the repetitive task of filing.

His rescue came at lunchtime, in the form of Garlan sticking his head around the doorjamb and asking Renly if he didn’t fancy an afternoon in the sun instead of being holed up inside the stuffy office. Renly all but physically jumped at the opportunity and Garlan held open the door for him before leading him downstairs and out to the orchard once again, where Loras was hanging upside down from a tree branch by his knees, tshirt pooled around his head and displaying a trim, tanned chest. Renly raised his eyebrows.

‘What’re you doing, Loras?’

Loras scowled, hoiking himself back up among the tree branches and climbing away, nimble as a monkey. Within seconds he was completely shielded from view by the leaves and budding fruits, and Garlan rolled his eyes in his brother’s general direction. He showed Renly over to a Macoun tree with two or three new shoots stuck in various places along the trunk, covered in a thick waxy sort of substance that was dry to the touch.

‘These are the new grafts,’ Garlan told him, ‘harvested from Starks and Roxburys last year. We’re looking to make sure they’re still taking well, that there’s no sign of disease in the scion – the new part,’ he explained when Renly looked confused, ‘and just generally checking over the health of the tree. The Roxbury is the later graft, which Dad did when he was technically ever so slightly too late for it, so we’re not sure if it’s going to take properly.’

Renly, who had next to no idea what a diseased apple tree would look like, decided to just observe Garlan looking the trees over and see what he could learn.

‘So, when you’re wanting to graft, you cut scions in the winter when they’re budding, and you want them about this thick–’ He held up his thumb and forefinger about a quarter of an inch apart – ‘to do it. Most of our apple trees are scion grafts, but the rose bushes are bud grafts, which means you take buds from the scion plant and graft them onto the stock.’ He laughed as he caught sight of Renly’s clueless expression. ‘The scion is the plant with the characteristics you want to replicate – say, taste and texture of the fruit, size, colour, scent of the flowers, whatever – and the stock is the hardier tree that you transplant the scion onto. So that’s usually less than five years old, still young, and strong enough to fight off diseases. With the root stock, the quality of its fruit isn’t important – it’s the strength of the tree that you want. Does that make sense?’

‘If you’re asking if I get it, the answer’s no,’ Renly confessed, smiling, and Garlan laughed.

‘Not to worry,’ he told him with a grin, slapping him on the back, ‘I didn’t either when Dad explained it. I had to get Willas and his horticulture studies textbook out in the barn for two hours before I even began to understand.’

An apple dropped from the tree above them and Renly looked up to see Loras lounging on a low bough like a panther, tossing another apple between his hands as though deciding whether or not Renly was worth the effort of throwing it. He seemed to decide not, and dropped it on the ground instead where it landed with a soft thump at Garlan’s feet.

‘Grandma’ll have your hide if you’re picking her Starks, Loras.’

‘I’m not scared of Grandma.’

‘That’s the biggest lie you’ve ever told,’ Garlan scoffed, his eyes twinkling. ‘You’re terrified of her, you’re just acting the big man to impress your new friend.’ He gestured to Renly, and Loras went red, eyes narrowing furiously. He yanked another apple off the tree and threw it with great force at Garlan’s head; his brother ducked, and instead it hit Renly square between the eyes and made him yelp in pain.

Garlan burst out laughing. Loras snarled, ‘I hate you both!’ and shinned back up the tree, taking refuge amongst the apples as Renly blinked hard and rubbed his fingertips over the welt on his forehead. He’d never imagined that being pelted with fruit could hurt quite so much, but then, he’d never met Loras Tyrell’s temper before, either.

* * *

After dinner, where Renly had two plates of chicken and one bowl of fruit cobbler pushed on him by Alerie, he decided to hunt down Willas. He found the Tyrells’ eldest son in the study, which was a large room at the back of the house with a desk, a lamp, a couple of armchairs, and shelves full of books lining three of the four walls. Willas was sat at the desk, injured leg extended out in front of him and resting on a small ottoman, with a large book spread open in his lap. He was thoroughly absorbed in reading, from what Renly could see, and yet the moment Renly stepped across the threshold he looked up and closed the book.

‘Renly,’ he said warmly, his brown eyes earnest. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘I was hoping you might be able to do for me what you did for Garlan, and explain grafting,’ Renly admitted, and Willas smiled.

‘Of course.’ He gestured for Renly to sit in one of the armchairs. ‘I’m afraid I’m not always the best at explaining things, but hopefully I can help at least a little bit.’ He pushed himself up to stand, limping heavily as he crossed the room to fetch a very battered textbook off one of the shelves and brought it back to the desk, where he spread it out for Renly to see before explaining, pointing at the relevant diagrams and answering the questions Renly posed to him. After twenty minutes or so, Renly understood a lot better.

‘Thanks.’

‘Any time.’ Willas rubbed his knee with one hand, shifting in his seat to get comfortable. When Renly didn’t leave, he looked up at him again. ‘There’s something else troubling you?’

‘Just… Loras.’ Renly sighed heavily. ‘He seems to hate me. Like, _really_ hate me.’

Willas, to his surprise, shot him a wicked grin more fitting of Garlan than the serious older brother Renly had until now believed him to be.

‘Oh, he’ll get over it in no time. He’s just being remarkably childish. I’m sure you’ve heard that little boys always pull the pigtails of girls they like on the playground, and Loras is no different, other than being seventeen instead of seven.’

Renly was nonplussed. ‘What?’

Willas, infuriatingly, just smirked again and told him not to worry about it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Awww, Loras has a _crush_.

**Author's Note:**

>  _We Need To Talk About Kevin_ is a great book and a great film. Disturbing, yes - I would imagine most books about teenage psychopaths are - but still, very good. I would recommend it!


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